It's a brand new day... sort of

This weekend was a good time to write post cards. It was miserably hot on Saturday and only a little better Sunday. weather.com kept promising rain, but it didn't come until this morning (and it felt fantastic when it did). The most productive thing I did this weekend was to go to Port Maillot because I have to go there Friday morning to catch a bus to Beauvais for my flight to Dublin and I wanted to see it once before I go half-awake at 0600 on Friday.

Julien took Johanna and I to the C2RMF at the Louvre today to have a tour and do SEM on 4 of the coins: AN43U, KETH kurai, ASD46 and the Roman coin. The Roman coin didn't do so well, or at least, we had a hard time seeing the coin's features with the SEM. The dime seemed to be in particularly good shape, and silver completely dominated the composition readings (as it should, it's supposed to be 90% copper) with some carbon, oxygen, and aluminum (Julien suggested contamination, or rubbing). Bianca thought we might have time to do the front and back of all 4 coins, but we only had time to do the fronts. I'll discuss the results in more detail tomorrow with Bianca. We have the whole day in the lab tomorrow, so I'm really hoping I get to ablate something before Xiaowei cuts off the laser at the end of tomorrow.

In the mean time, here's a close up of the "w" from the "in God we trust" on the dime from the SEM.
We took a more zoomed in image of the same spot; I just happen to like this one more. I'll probably post more tomorrow. We're going back to the C2RMF next week to look at some ablation craters. They WILL be there by then.